AT&T slashes test data provisioning to minutes and time-to-market by 80%

AT&T Communications is the world’s largest telecommunications company, the largest provider of mobile telephone services, and the largest provider of fixed telephone services in the United States.

As part of providing these services and an exceptional customer experience, the company is continuously developing and improving applications for both customers and internal operational support. However, despite its adoption of DevOps and Agile methodologies, its lack of fast, on-demand access to realistic test data prevented the rapid time-to-market it needed.

Key challenges

Communications firms, including wireless carriers, cable, and media companies, have enormous amounts of data on their customers, networks, devices, plans, and more. Providing access to the right data at the right time—and to the right person—can transform the customer experience. That’s true whether it is via the web, or mobile apps, or simply providing the support team the insights it needs to provide fast, knowledgeable service. That’s what DevOps is all about—enabling companies to quickly develop, test, and deploy customer and operational systems that keep customers happy.

Testing these apps is where most DevOps and Agile development pipelines slow to a crawl. That’s because the data needed to adequately test and re-test each app is trapped in siloed systems and databases.

Traditional Test Data Management (TDM) involves manual requests, multiple teams, and time-consuming database backups and restores. This means provisioning test data alone can take days or even weeks. Despite the agility a DevOps pipeline promises, this prolongs each test cycle and forces a time-to-market cycle from three to six months—at best.

In addition to negatively impacting time-to-market, traditional TDM’s dependence on manual processes means data experts are tasked with repetitive busy-work instead of higher value-added work. That means the cost to support testing—not to mention masking data to keep it secure—continues to rise over time.

Results

K2View Test Data Management (TDM)
A unique approach to test data management

What AT&T needed was the ability to rapidly access the data it needed for testing, then organize it, and deliver on demand. Because K2View TDM performs 1,000 times faster than traditional TDM, AT&T can now provision up-to-date data, scrub and mask it automatically, reducing test data creation to a self-service task that takes just minutes, not days or weeks. K2View TDM also eliminates redundant test environments, saving costs on equipment and maintenance, while having zero impact on current operational systems.

Stores and retrieves data based on business logic

K2View TDM lets the test team model digital entities to create test data that meet their business needs, not those of the source applications. And the testing applications can access the data in milliseconds, shortening the time each testing cycle takes to complete.

Continuous data sourcing from ANY source

K2View TDM’s micro-database design allows most any data source—traditional RDBMS, big data warehouses/lake, flat files, web services, cloud apps and more—to be integrated and continuously updated to the test data environment.

Central, efficient masking, modification, and generation of data

K2View TDM can access and automatically subset data “in the wild” without massive bulk copying, and can be set up automatic masking, transformations, and validation rules. That means test data is always current, secure, and in the form it’s needed.

Simple, secure, and fast self-service access to quality testing data

K2View TDM provides on-demand 360° views of customers or any other business entity data—digital entities—that need to be tested in milliseconds, all in one place, and with each one stored in its own micro-database and secured by its own encryption key.